598 pages

Thirty years after its publication, this book was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.--From publisher description

The peculiar nature of cities. The uses of sidewalks : safety -- The uses of sidewalks : contact -- The uses of sidewalks : assimilating children -- The uses of neighborhood parks -- The uses of city neighborhoods -- The conditions for city diversity. The generators of diversity -- The need for primary mixed uses -- The need for small blocks -- The need for aged buildings -- The need for concentration -- Some myths about diversity -- Forces of decline and regeneration. The self-destruction of diversity -- The curse of border vacuums -- Unslumming and slumming -- Gradual money and cataclysmic money -- Different tactics. Subsidizing dwellings -- Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles -- Visual order : its limitations and possibilities -- Salvaging projects -- Governing and planning districts -- The kind of problem a city is

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